The chain is original to the bike. It had about four hours in an ultrasonic cleaner, which removed half a ton of Welsh road. After that it was three days in an oil bath. Note correct use of casserole dish lid.

Last edited by ironbike on Wed Dec 27, 2017 11:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The mudguards caused me a few issues. Mainly because when I started out I wasn't entirely sure what I was looking for. This resulted in me making a couple of mistaken purchases - firstly a set of Club Specials, which were the wrong model and the wrong size, and then a set of beautiful All Rounders which were the right model but again too big. The rarity of 26 inch All Rounders leads me to suspect that most of the production went straight to Raleigh. I've never seen any NOS 26 inch All Rounders.

The ones I found popped up suddenly on eBay and I had a brief bidding war to get them. By this time I was wise to the size thing and asked the seller to give me the measurements. He lived a good four hours from my house and didn't want to post them, so this was yet another long drive... just for a pair of mudguards. The old boy I got them from had bought some bits from a closing down bike shop 45 years ago - and these mudguards were stowed away in his garage for the whole of that time.

They were used of course ( probably taken off an Olympus, possibly a Dawes ) and you can see that they were literally covered in tiny (and large) scratches all over.

Last edited by ironbike on Wed Dec 27, 2017 11:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Using the spare Club Specials as an experimental guinea pig I set about seeing if I could polish the scratches out. It worked. After some success with them I turned my attention to the All Rounders and flatted them down. I used wet and dry starting with 600 and ending up with 2400 with a lot of washing up liquid. After that I moved on to cutting compound and then 3M superfine compound and finished off with 3M machine polish. I was determined to get a good gloss without any wax, but it took days to achieve. Got rid of all the scratches though.

In this picture you can see how I covered the Bluemels stamp with tape to prevent it being polished out. There's no visible step between the newly-polished section and the stamp now that it's all back to a full gloss. Pretty scary moment, flatting down such a rare pair of mudguards, but it all worked out nicely.

Last edited by ironbike on Wed Dec 27, 2017 11:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Really impressive!My first ever "racing" bike was the 24" wheel Raleigh Olympus in metallic red with bright blue mudguards. Such fantastic memories which your post brought backHuret 5 speed, white wall tyres (24 x 1 3/8), world sprint champion decal with rainbow stripes on the downtube like yours, identical white/gold decals. A couple of years later my friend bought the 26" wheel version and I remember a few differences - mine had deeper profile handlebars (naively, since his did not have the Sprint decal I thought mine were specialist sprint handlebars lol), mine had a stem branded Milremo which looked the part to me at that age but with hindsight it was probably a lot heavier, different brake hoods - mine were thin like all kids bike brakes of the time so I couldn't ride on the hoods and his had thinner 1 inch tyres gum coloured sides.I'd love to get hold of an old Raleigh catalogue to see a high quality picture.In the intervening years I've had bikes by Bianchi, British Eagle (Barry Hoban -badged), Giant, De Rosa, Specialized and I've just picked up a custom-made Columbus Life steel framed bike from Vetta. I've enjoyed all and some have been incredibly high quality but none gave me such a broad smile as my Olympus did at 8 years old.Thanks for posting

My brother had the red one - although as I mentioned his mudguards didn't last five minutes. I still look at the red mudguards on the one I've restored and wonder at the good fortune I had in finding them. The cool old boy I bought them off had the most amazing garages, quite literally crammed with original old car parts from the '60s, all still in boxes. He also had about 7000 bike spokes which he was keen for me to buy!

Here's a picture of the small and larger sized Olympus from the 1971 Raleigh catalogue. The handlebars you mention clearly visible.

Last edited by ironbike on Wed Dec 27, 2017 11:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.

That's such a great image. And if I'm honest... yes, I dressed exactly like that back then. I love the reference to "British Precision." The tolerances on my Olympus are about a quarter of an inch all round!

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